Nathan Kaplan

Nathan "Kid Dropper" Kaplan (3 August 1891-28 August 1923) was a Jewish-American labor racketeer during the early 20th century.

Biography
Nathan Kaplan was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City on 3 August 1891 to a Jewish family, and he became a petty thief as a youth. Kaplan became known as "Kid Dropper" for giving dropped wallets to people in exchange for money; little did his victims know that the wallets were filled with fake money, and Kaplan made easy money using this trick. Kaplan formed his own gang during the 1910s, and he provided muscle to strikers in the city, becoming known as a "labor slugger". Kaplan murdered rival gangster Johnny Spanish in 1919 and took over Jacob Orgen's gang after his imprisonment, and he controlled all of the labor slugging in New York for a brief period. In 1923, however, a free Orgen and his allies Legs Diamond, Louis Buchalter, and Jacob Shapiro rallied against Kaplan, who was gunned down by Louis Cohen on 28 August 1923 after being escorted to a courtroom by policemen.